Mark Duffield: The MCG grand final deal is nothing but a VFL relic

The AFL's MCG deal is short-sighted and biased

VideoChief football writer Mark Duffield slams the AFL's decision to award the MCG the AFL grand final hosting rights until the year 2057 in return for a multi-million dollar investment

You can dress up a male dog in a tuxedo if you want, but sooner or later it will try and pee on your car tyres and may even hump your leg.

The AFL can hold itself up as a genuinely national competition as much as it wants to but sooner or later it will expose itself as what it is and always has been - the Victorian Football League in disguise.

The AFL’s deal with the Victorian Government, swapping stadium and facilities funding to lock in the staging of the AFL grand final at the MCG until 2057, is not a deal ahead of its time. It is a deal from another time.

It is a deal from a time when interstate clubs had to play finals at the MCG even though they had earned the right to stage them in their home state because of a dodgy MCG contract - think West Coast v Essendon in 1996, the Eagles v Carlton in 1999 or Brisbane v Geelong in 2004.

Eagles fans will remember the first two but it could be argued that the third of those games was the worst. Brisbane had to play in Melbourne on a Saturday night then fly back for the grand final the next Thursday in pursuit of an historic fourth successive flag.

We look back on those games now and ask: did that really happen?

And yet here is evidence, yet again, that integrity is for sale in the AFL provided the key beneficiaries lie east of Adelaide and south of Sydney.

Victorians gnash their teeth when a single home-and-away game is sold to a non-Victorian club as if precious integrity has been compromised when they have been selling off competition integrity to themselves since the VFL was expanded in 1987.

Camera IconWhat incentive does the NSW Government have to upgrade its AFL facilities?Picture: Getty Images

Here is one of the biggest sporting events in Australia being gifted as a home game for any Victorian club good enough to make it.

It is a trade off for a $225 million stadium re-development at Etihad Stadium, period. Don’t give us the nonsense about all the grass roots, community and women’s hub facilities that the AFL gets as part of this. Those facilities get provided by local, state and or federal governments over time as a matter of course and as part of a government’s role in the community.

One of the things the WA Government repeatedly pointed out during the stadium negotiation was how much it had done for football in this state without any of it being contingent on shifting to the new Burswood Stadium.

This deal is not near-sighted or far-sighted. It is devoid of sight. How much will have changed by 2030 let alone 2057? How many clubs will there be in Victoria and how many elsewhere? What size stadium will it take to properly accommodate a Sydney derby crowd by then? What incentive will there be for a NSW government to provide such a facility without any chance of bidding for an AFL grand final?

This takes us a significant distance backwards from 2018, let alone 2057.